AGENDA 21 RADIO

BY CHRISS STREET

After four years of making huge profits selling war materials, food and oil supplies to the combatants in World War 1, the United States declared war on Germany just after the Russian Revolution and the British and French were on the verge of collapse.

When the United States entered the “War to End all Wars,” the Central Powers led by Germany had launched their Western Front spring offensive on March 21 and were driving a huge wedge through the Allied French and the British forces to Amiens, just 72 miles north of Paris. In the disastrous counterattack, the Allied forces suffered huge losses and French troops began to mutiny.

The Russian Revolution that began on March 12, 2017, caused Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate on March 15 after the Russian Army forces mutinied and joined the revolution. Germany transported exiled communist leader Vladimir Lenin, his wife, a few socialists, from neutral Switzerland to arrive in St. Petersburg on April 3.

With the European powers fully engaged in war effort and desperate for financial and material support, President Woodrow Wilson and Congress maintained the United States’ neutrality, while America’s gross national product from 1914 to 1917 grew by 20 percent. During the period, U.S. steel production doubled and the nation added 2 million jobs.

As the last major nation to with currency convertibility into gold, the newly formed Federal Reserve had accumulated $3.2 billion in gold reserves of $3.12 billion, over four times the U.S. monetary base currency in circulation and bank reserve cash, plus twice the legal requirement.

Germany had discontinued unrestricted U-Boat attacks on commercial ships in May 2015 after torpedoes that sank the RMS Lusitania caused the loss of over 1,000 passenger deaths — including the loss of 128 American citizens.

But the Germans restarted unrestricted U-Boat attacks in February 2017, with a goal sinking 600,000 tons of commercial shipping per month near the British Isles and in the Mediterranean, according to Stratfor. The Kaiser Wilhem’s High Command submarine attacks would eventually pull the U.S. into the war, but they assumed that with French, Russian and British Allied forces near collapse and it would take the small, ill-equipped and inexperienced American Army at least two years before they could get significant forces into Europe.

The Germans may also have concluded that the United States were going to join the Allied forces, after British cryptographers deciphered and then released in January 2017 an encrypted letter from Germany’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann to one of his ambassadors suggesting Mexico join Germany and Japan in declaring war on the U.S.

Congress demanded that the American Expeditionary Force under the command of General John J. Pershing proceed to the Western Front immediately. But even with U.S. production already geared for war, less than 15,000 American soldiers had arrived in France by June 1917. It took another year to get U.S. troop strength in Europe to 1 million.